Machine Learning and Unstructured Data: The New Peanut Butter on Toast

Machine Learning and Unstructured Data: The New Peanut Butter on Toast

Businesses typically operate on structured data. However, in the Internet era, most data that is available to businesses is unstructured, commonly stored as text from various sources — webpages, user forums, or audio and video, for example. Most organizations have mounds of this unstructured data, and they often struggle to make sense of it or to generate useful, actionable insights from it. To create any sort of intelligence from unstructured data, analysts have to manipulate it in some way — that is where machine learning really helps. Individually, unstructured data and machine learning can be academically bland, but if used together, they provide a rich smorgasbord of insight for strategic marketing.Machine Learning Today Although machine learning can be valuable on any type of data (structured or unstructured), unstructured data is…